Debiasing Welch's method for spectral density estimation
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Published version
Author(s)
Astfalck, Lachlan
Sykulski, Adam M
Cripps, Edward
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Welch’s method provides an estimator of the power spectral density that is statistically consistent. This is achieved by averaging over periodograms calculated from overlapping segments of a time series. For a finite length time series, while the variance of the estimator decreases as the number of segments increase, the magnitude of the estimator’s bias increases: a bias-variance trade-off ensues when setting the segment number. We address this issue by providing a novel method for debiasing Welch’s method which maintains the computational complexity and asymptotic consistency, and leads to improved finite-sample performance. Theoretical results are given for fourth-order stationary processes with finite fourth-order moments and absolutely convergent fourth-order cumulant function. The significant bias reduction is demonstrated with numerical simulation and an application to real-world data. Our estimator also permits irregular spacing over frequency and we demonstrate how this may be employed for signal compression and further variance reduction. Code accompanying this work is available in R and python.
Date Issued
2024-12-01
Date Acceptance
2024-06-13
Citation
Biometrika, 2024, 111 (4), pp.1313-1329
ISSN
0006-3444
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Start Page
1313
End Page
1329
Journal / Book Title
Biometrika
Volume
111
Issue
4
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Biometrika Trust.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Identifier
https://academic.oup.com/biomet/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biomet/asae033/7703280?searchresult=1
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
asae033
Date Publish Online
2024-07-02